Thai Wood

Generating Secure Passwords With Ruby, Atmospheric Noise, and Comics

Generating passwords that you can remember, but that are still secure is almost an everyday battle for most sysadmins. The problem is that the common way of generating passwords (i.e. i3VVH4w32X) may not really be very secure, as explained in this XKCD comic:
There are a few XKCD style password generators out on the web, but I don't really like the idea of someone else generating my passwords for me. To solve this problem I whipped up this quick little Ruby script that makes a new wordlist based upon the top article in a Google News search for a given keyword. I tend to use apologize, someone is always apologizing for something it seems. I then use random.org which generates true randomness using atmospheric noise which is pretty awesome. They even have an Intro to randomness. If nothing else, hopefully this will be a good reminder that strong password security is important and that like anything else, it is easy to become complacent with.
If you're looking for more Ruby solutions to make your life easier, check out my book, pre-release version now available, Ruby For System Administrators.
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